Please join us for a presentation of work-in-progress with Professor Reinhold Martin, with a response by Professor Richard R. John.
Designing Wavelength: Production in a Vacuum, c. 1930
What is use? Much more than a means to an end, use is an idea, a symbol as well as a technical act. Reconstructing a dialectic of ideational and material professes, The Idea of Use: Technology as Symbolic Form from Petroleum to Photovoltaics, the manuscript from which this draft chapter is excerpted, cuts a historical cross-section through the twentieth-century American technosphere. From oil underground to atmospheric microwaves to satellites in orbit, the technological systems--or media complexes--examined in the book all helped to write and to realize the American myth of technological progess and national triumph, cast in capital. An intellectual history of technology, The Idea of Use is also a history of that myth as an untimely elegy, a promise unmade.
Long recognized but largely unutilized, the electromagnetic spectrum was reconceived and partitioned just prior to the First World War as a resource for wireless communication subject to engineering design. Longer wavelengths were reserved for commercial and military use; shorter ones were left amateurs until, with the development of vacuum tubes, these proved especially suited for voice communication over long distances. The continuous wave technologies that found widespread application during the war thus formed a new horizon of thought that spanned between point-to-point communications and broadcast radio. The two shared many techniques, including the production of a vacuum in a sealed enclosure and the use of feedback to amplify a signal. Point-to-point wireless was reserved for air and sea, while broadcast radio became the law of the land. Formed in 1920 to secure international wireless communications for US-based capital, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which held a near monopoly over the supply of vacuum tubes, quickly turned its focus inward, toward the nation as a market. Seeking to circumvent RCA's patents, a group of smaller firms linked to the San Francisco shipping industry and with Stanford University formed a nexus around point-to-point shortwave, in what would become Silicon Valley. The RCA Building (1933) in New York, an apotheosis of the modernist skyscraper-as-steamship, was a component in this media complex. Even as that building's site, Rockefeller Center, commemorated the petroleum complex, passing invisibly through the skyscraper-steamship's walls like a radio wave was the intellectual, technological, and economic history of the vacuum tube, disassembled.
RSVP required to received pre-circulated reading and, for non-Columbia affiliate, a QR code to access campus. To RSVP, email comparativemedia@columbia.edu.